Tom Sugimura lives in southern California with his wife, Amanda, and their four children. He is a team member with the biblical counseling training ministry, Overseas Instruction in Counseling (OIC), and trains in various places worldwide. In addition, Tom is a vocational pastor at New Life Church in Woodland Hills, CA.
Since the summer following his high school graduation, Tom Sugimura’s eyes have been open to the abundant need for godly leaders and pastors in churches around the world. Through various mission trips during his early college years, Tom realized ways he could offer his life in service to the church abroad. He also became convicted seeing the lasting impact the Christian gospel had on so many lives. Because of these experiences, Tom began to pursue ministry as his vocation, even as he completed his studies to become an engineer. After graduating from college, Tom married Amanda, whom he had met back in middle school, and they moved down to southern California so he could study at The Master’s Seminary (TMS), where he received Master of Divinity and Master of Theology degrees.
While studying at TMS, Tom was exposed to the world of biblical counseling. Even though Tom had come to know the Lord as a young child and grew up in a Christian home, the nature of biblical counseling was very new to him. However, it resonated deeply with him, as he saw the myriad of practical applications it recognized and drew out from the Scriptures. He studied under Dr. Stuart Scott, among others, at TMS and served in an Asian-American church for seven years during and after seminary.
Tom reflected back on how it was not until he began working in church revitalization that he really began to use his biblical counseling training. The Lord had moved Tom and Amanda to the Woodland Hills area in California to revitalize a church that had been seeking his help with leading their people. After eighty years of worshipping together, the church had shut down and, when Tom and his wife began their ministry there, only about thirty people remained.
Tom quickly found himself walking with these thirty people through a lot of grief, anger, despair, hopelessness, and conflict, during which time he became a counselor by necessity. This biblical discipleship among his church members led to the start of a biblical counseling ministry, which has also reached out to the community around them. Through this ministry, Tom has led the church faithfully and watched people flourish by God’s Word through sermons and other means of teaching practical application.
Through the steady instruction in God’s Word leading to practical application, Tom has been able to see the words of Romans 15:14 come to life among the congregation. It states that the Scriptures train and help people to be “full of goodness, filled with knowledge and able to instruct one another” (ESV). Quickly, a culture and mind set developed among the people of New Life Church in which counseling was not seen as a job for professionals, but an every-day discipleship tool useful in the hands of every member.
As noted earlier, Tom’s heart has always been for both the local church as well as the church abroad. Such passion is evident through his very active ministry overseas. During his early adulthood, participation in mission trips pointed him towards the greater goal of the church: to bring glory to God by making disciples of Jesus Christ through the proclamation of the gospel (see Matt 28:19-20). He personally saw the significant impact a life of Christian ministry service can have on people both near his home and around the world.
One way Tom has recently begun to minister overseas is through the ministry of Overseas Instruction in Counseling. Tom heard about OIC while taking classes at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) where he met Don Roy, a coordinator with the ministry. Upon hearing about OIC, he was seriously drawn to their vision and goals as they directly corresponded to his love for missions and biblical counseling.
Around the ten-year mark of OIC’s ministry work, Tom began to go on trips with the OIC team during which he saw the effectiveness of OIC’s teaching. OIC works to raise up leaders from and for the local church who are equipped to teach people the sufficiency and practicality of the Bible and lead them into greater sanctification. Tom briefly shared a ratio to help put into perspective the amount of counseling training need there is for church leaders in East Asia: for every pastor looking for theological training there are roughly five to seven pastors looking for counseling training. There is a rapidly growing number of new believers in East Asia, so the next logical step for these churches is pursuit of biblical discipleship, yet there is still very little training for these leaders within their own regions or countries.
Tom has seen many people affected by the teaching provided by OIC, as new leaders are trained and equipped with God’s Word to invest in the lives of others. Yet OIC’s team members also often see many struggles and needs in those very leaders of the church, as they deal with the complexity of their own lives. Tom describes the pastors that come to OIC’s Church Leadership Training modules as “sponges,” ready to soak up every word that the teachers can offer. They will teach for up to twelve hours per day and even during breaks the students want to talk about the practicality of what they are learning.
Tom recounts that what gives him the greatest encouragement from these training meetings is hearing how the leaders are taking the resources back to their home churches or starting new churches, reaching and encouraging more hearts for the Lord. Church leaders who have received the biblical counseling training offered through OIC are known for taking the biblical truths and principles that they learned and putting them straight into practice through ministry to their churches. Although much travel is still currently closed due to COVID restrictions, Tom prays and hopes to be back on the field soon so he can continue investing in the lives of the current and future pastors and to help them grow in winning and teaching more people for Christ.
For new counselors going into ministry, Tom shared words of exhortation straight from the heart of Psalm 1: “Blessed is the man who meditates on God’s Word and continues to bear fruit; be deep in God’s Word so that you can see how you can offer your life to the people around you.” He emphasized that the best way to learn how to do ministry is by doing it—so he exhorts all believers to get involved with the ministry of their local churches.
Ultimately, the Scriptures are the only tool available for truly understanding the hearts of people, so Tom continually stressed the importance of knowing and meditating on the Bible. In order to be like the tree planted by streams of water which bears much fruit in its season, as Psalm 1 depicts, the counselor must be intimately acquainted with God’s Word because it is how he or she can learn to rightly view other people as well as the world. This is the emphasis of OIC’s ministry as they train trainers of biblical counseling around the world with the goal of building up Christian leaders who will love and cherish God’s Word so much that they uphold it above all else for the glory of the Lord and the good of His people. So, if you desire, as do Tom and Amanda, to see the glory of God spread to the uttermost parts of the earth as His church is built up through the training and equipping of her members in the richly sufficient and relevant Bible for daily life, then we would encourage you to partner with the Sugimuras and OIC through ongoing prayer support and/or a financial gift. If you would like to become prayer partners, you can do so by becoming an OIC Insider here. And, if you would also like to provide financial resources as a gift, you can do so through the OIC website here.
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